(sup) (en) Allan Antliff's anarchism

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A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
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anarchism: left for dead amid the carnage
by NOT BORED! 16 January 2003
Allan Antliff is an Assisant Professor of Art History at the
University of Alberta, Canada. He's making a name, indeed, a career
for himself as a specialist in modern art and anarchism. His
dissertation, accepted by the University of Delaware in 1998, was
entitled The Culture of Revolt: Art and Anarchism in America,
1908-1920. In 2001, he published both "Only a Beginning": An
Anthology of Anarchist Culture and Anarchist Modernism: Art,
Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde. There will be another
book out soon, concerning Anarchist Dadaism in New York. Anarchism,
anarchism,
anarchism: one might think that the State was actually in danger of
being smashed sometime soon!
It's surprising that Antliff, who's right on (tenure) track, would
stop the train to respond, and at length, to a "negative" review of
one of his books, especially to a "negative" review published in a
marginal, non-academic journal. What does a negative review in a some
rag mean to a professor with a "hot" specialty? N-o-t-h-i-n-g.
Professors do not earn their living from book sales; it is the simple
fact that they've published a(nother) book that helps them get
promotions, tenured
positions, administrative posts, etc etc. And yet issue #54 (Winter
2002-2003) of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed carried Antliff's
long response to a review of Anarchist Modernism that was written by
Patrick Frank and published in Anarchy #53 (Spring-Summer 2002).
Though critical, the original review wasn't completely negative or
dismissive of Antliff's accomplishments. Patrick Frank merely
asserted that the main argument of Anarchist Modernism -- that
"anarchism was the formative force lending coherence and direction to
modernism in the United States between 1908 and 1920" (emphasis in
original) -- is "inflated." Not incorrect, but inflated or
over-stated. And of course Patrick Frank is right: Antliff could have
made the more modest claim that anarchism was one of the forces
lending coherence and direction to "early American modernism" and not
provoked any objections. But Antliff pressed on, not because (as an
anarchist) he felt anarchism didn't have to share the glory with
other "formative forces," but because (as an academic) the more
modest claim made his own specialization look less relevant, less
important, not so "hot." And so Antliff made anarchism the single
decisive factor, made himself indispensible, someone who has, in his
own words, made "new discoveries" that require (every)one to "reset
the boundaries of debate." He shifted the center of attention away
from anarchism to his "bold" claims about it.
After dispatching with poor Patrick Frank, Antliff's response doesn't
end (as it should). Instead, it goes on to provide blurb-like quotes
from four positive reviews of Anarchist Modernism and to encourage
the readers of Anarchy to read the book for themselves. These
gestures make Antliff seem overly impressed with his own
accomplishments, overly sensitive to criticism, and -- perhaps most
importantly -- desperate for a (single) good review in an anarchist
publication. Antliff describes himself as an anarchist. And yet none
of the positive reviews from which Antliff quotes were written by
anarchists. Most of them were published in art magazines; only one of
these positive reviews was published in a political publication and
it was the decidely non-anarchist magazine Left History.
But it is unlikely that Anarchist Modernism will ever get the type of
review that its author wants, that is, a positive review from an
anarchist. Why? Antliff's "anarchism" is both too inclusive and too
narrowly defined. In the introduction, he writes,
<quote>
In the course of disccussion I refer to a number of tendencies in the
American anarchist and socialist movements, all of which contributed
to the makeup of the diverse milieus I am examining. These are
anarchist mutualism, anarchist collectivism, anarchist communism,
anarchist syndicalism, anarchist individualism, parliamentary
socialism, and Bolshevism.
<end quote>
For Antliff, anarchism isn't incompatible with such explicitly
anti-anarchist movements as socialism, communism, and Bolshevism. As
we read his book, we find out that, for Antliff -- and perhaps only
for Antliff -- anarchism is also compatible with mysticism
(theosophy) and reactionary nationalism (the writings of
Coomarasamy). Antliff's "anarchism" is actually a misnomer for
"individualism." In the body of his book, despite what he says in his
introduction, Antliff never finds or discusses any artists influenced
by anarchist mutualism, anarchist collectivism, anarchist communism
or anarchist
syndicalism. Instead, all he finds are artists who are "anarchist
individualists," "philosophical anarchists," people who define
themselves as rebels against "mass society" or "the masses," people
who don't form collectives, forge collective (anonymous) styles, or
work in collaboration with each other, but instead form "schools"
that preserve and reinforce uniqueness and individuality.
Ironically, Antliff's book gives voice to a couple ringing critiques
of individualism. Paraphrasing Irwin Granich (only to say that he was
wrong), Antliff says "Individualism in the arts was the epitome of
bourgeois social and psychological decay." Quoting Carl Zigrosser
(only to say that he, too, was wrong), Antliff says "Under capitalism
the artist had become 'a curious being, an anarchist, a product of
spontaneous generation, a being apart from the crowd' who spoke 'a
strange language, unintelligible to those who lived in the world.'"
It is shocking, but not surprising, that Antliff believes that both
anarchism and anarchist art ended around 1920, that is, at the time
that two phenomena -- the US government's attempts (motivated by the
1902 assassination of President McKinley) to arrest and deport all
foreign-born anarchists, and the post-1917 immigration of anarchists
(back) to Russia, where many of them were imprisoned or slaughtered
by the Bolsheviks -- overlapped and strengthened each other. For
Antliff, anarchism's defeat around 1920 was complete; there was
simply no anarchist culture in the 1920s or 1930s.
<quote>
[B]y the early 1920s [Antliff writes] Bolshevism had vanquished
anarchism, and with it the political relevance of artistic innovation
[...] Once this link [between creativity and anti-capitalist
rebellion] was severed, "anarchist" modernism withered on the vine
[...] Anarchist modernism's demise was setting the stage for what
Richard Fitzgerald calls the "great failure" of the
communist-dominated thirties.
<end quote>
For Antliff, Bolshevism also "vanquished" Anton Pannekoek and the
other council communists, for whom "Lenin dealt the death blow" in
1920, after which they, a mere "scattering of isolated individuals,"
were headed for "oblivion."
Ummm. . . . Someone should tell Professor Antliff about the following
significant historical events, none of which would have taken place
if anarchism had indeed been "vanquished" in 1920: the Kronstadt
rebellion of 1921; the anarchist uprising in Spain in 1936; and the
formation of workers' councils in Hungary in 1956, France in 1968,
Portugal in 1975 and Poland in 1980. Professor Antliff doesn't seem
to know a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g about these clearly anarchist events or how
they might follow from or retrospectively illuminate those that took
place in America between 1908 and 1920.
One would expect that a book such as Anarchist Modernism -- an
expensive, hardcover-only volume published by the University of
Chicago Press -- would be full of pretty pictures and that they would
make the book worth looking at, despite its ah political
shortcomings. But, no, not even that. Sure, the book has plenty of
illustrations, 84 in total. But only 4 of them are color; 6 of the
black-and-white images are very badly reproduced, and so make "close
reading" impossible.
Not a problem for Allan Antliff, who doesn't offer a close reading of
any of the images in his book. Most often, these images simply
"stream by" as one turns the pages, without Antliff saying anything
about them, as if they "speak for themselves," which of course they
don't. Sometimes Antliff will stop the image-stream to offer a brief
description of one of them: "In the Figure Benn depicts a woman
standing against a forested background that looks more like a
decorative
screen," he writes in one of his better moments. "The face and arms
of the woman are rendered in outline and she wears a brightly
patterned smock that is equally hard-edged, with no modeling to
distract from the work's formal qualities." Occasionally there are
mistakes in labeling (Walter Pach's paintings described as "cubist"
or "muted cubism") and some really atrocious sentences ("Man Ray's
dadaism, therefore, was the end game in a Stirnerist passage from
materialism in
painting to antiontological conceptualism").
It's telling that Antliff gives a pessimistic reading of the image
that appears as both a color plate and the book's cover: Man Ray's
1914 painting War (AD MCMXIV).
<quote>
The coldly mechanized soldiers and blasted landscape of War,
therefore, reflect Man Ray's conviction that World War I was the
dehumanizing progeny of the modern state and the capitalist economic
system it sustained [Antliff writes]. Pressing the point home, the
invading soldiers attack a mother whose fallen child lies in the
right foreground, left for dead amid the carnage. Here, the
expressive power of abstraction melded with an equally powerful
politics of protest: intent on destruction, these soldiers trample on
all humanity.
<end quote>
But we see a different painting, a different future. Man Ray's War
depicts an army of faceless red people who are riding horses and
attacking an army of faceless blue people on foot; the latter appear
to be out-numbered and on the verge of defeat. Completed at the
beginning of World War I, this painting seems to be a prediction or
perhaps an allegory. But what do "red" and "blue" stand for here?
Whose colors are they? Who is about to win a decisive battle? Is not
red frequently associated with socialists and communists? Like a
dream, this painting cries out for interpretation. At the bottom
right, underneath the block that bears the portentous date AD MCMXIV,
a small child-sized figure is curled up on its side. The child isn't
dead, simply sleeping! And what is being dreamed? Perhaps that one
day we wake up from the nightmare of war.
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